Why The Polls Understate Romney Vote
Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:
1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.
2. Almost all of the published polls show Obama getting less than 50% of the vote and less than 50% job approval. A majority of the voters either support Romney or are undecided in almost every poll.
Add these two factors together and the polls that are out there are all misleading. Any professional pollster (those consultants hired by candidates not by media outlets) would publish two findings for each poll — one using 2004 turnout modeling and the other using 2008 modeling. This would indicate just how dependent on an unusually high turnout of his base the Obama camp really is.
1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.
2. Almost all of the published polls show Obama getting less than 50% of the vote and less than 50% job approval. A majority of the voters either support Romney or are undecided in almost every poll.
Add these two factors together and the polls that are out there are all misleading. Any professional pollster (those consultants hired by candidates not by media outlets) would publish two findings for each poll — one using 2004 turnout modeling and the other using 2008 modeling. This would indicate just how dependent on an unusually high turnout of his base the Obama camp really is.
Couple of thoughts:
ReplyDelete1) I've never understood the psychology of this gambit. If it looks like my candidate is going to lose, that just motivates me to get in my vote all the more; to "leave it all out on the field," to employ a football metaphor. We saw this dynamic at work in the 2006 midterms, where it looked like Republicans were going to lose over fifty House seats before a surge in GOP enthusiasm - and, thus, turnout - held the losses to "just" thirty-five seats.
And then there's the mentality famously elucidated by Khan Noonien Singh in "Star Trek II": "From hell's heart, I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath...at thee...." If the other side is going to win, I'm going to make them pay as steep a price as possible for their (usually ill-gotten) victory.
2) The following occurred to me just yesterday: Can't this polling psych-ops gambit work both ways? If Dems are brainwashedly convinced that Red Barry has the election in the bag, wouldn't their arrogance and overconfidence make them more likely to stay home in the smug belief that they didn't need to bother voting? Seems more likely to me than that our side, so acutely aware of media bias over the years and never more so than now, could be duped into "demoralization".
If the partisan proportions of early/absentee voter requests in swing states are an indication, that gambit is boomeranging with a vengeance.